THE PROPHECY OF THE BOWL OF PETUNIAS

THE PROPHECY OF THE BOWL OF PETUNIAS it’s based on the dialog between Luca Pozzi and Vincenzo Agnetti. The heart of this confrontation is embodied by two “generator machines” staring each other down: Agnetti’s Macchina drogata (1968), an Olivetti calculator manipulated to produce oracular, incomprehensible messages, and Pozzi’s Arkanian Shenron (2020), a bronze dragon equipped with a particle detector and artificial intelligence. While the former “drugs” technology to find mystery in numbers, the latter captures the passage of invisible muons from space, translating them into divinatory messages shared in real-time. This interplay of language and mystery flows into the Rosetta Mission 2023, a virtual comet reconstructed from European Space Agency data. Here, the boundaries of time and territory dissolve as Agnetti’s works are hosted within a digital meta-place, accessible via visors or smartphones, acting as a contemporary Rosetta Stone for a borderless world.

As the visitor moves through the archive, the atmosphere becomes increasingly rarefied and ironic. The dialogue shifts from Agnetti’s 1976 Lezioni di design to Pozzi’s electromagnetic levitation platforms, where golden spheres float above carpets depicting black holes and virtual currencies—a suspended wait for the “irresistible unpredictability of the fall.” The exhibition’s title, The Prophecy of the Bowl of Petunias, finds its voice in a textual work by Pozzi, who imagines himself as a Douglas Adams from a plausible but improbable past. It is a game of mirroring that culminates in Agnetti’s Meridiana, which serves as a final, quiet commentary on the entire experience:”Time is the mental weight of events.” Through this collaboration, we are reminded that while history and biography tell us about time, it is only through the shared language of art that we are truly allowed to savor its depth.